I disagree, starting projects that were way too big for me taught me alot about not just the language I was using to develop them, but about best practices, why it is important to have a solid ground to stand on, before adding more features that seem cool. It also taught me the importance of testing, as my projects were getting bigger, more components were interacting with each other, and manual testing soon became way too time consuming.

In short, you learn by your mistakes.